PIR: a new resource for bioinformatics

The Protein Information Resource (PIR) has greatly expanded its Web site and developed a set of interactive search and analysis tools to facilitate the analysis, annotation, and functional identification of proteins. New search engines have been implemented ro combine sequence similarity search results with database annotation information. The new PIR search systems have proved very useful in providing enriched functional annotation of protein sequences, determining protein superfamily-domain relationships, and detecting annotation errors in genomic database archives.